Doctor Mike

I always worry when talking about mental health subjects or covering them, there's a way to talk about them responsibly where you are pointing out that this is not the normal way that you would go about diagnosing things, but you're doing this as a form of entertainment in order to educate.

Sometimes people blur the lines of that.

Have you seen that happening a bit?

I have.

Well, maybe we can talk about multiple avenues here.

So the classic example is you see someone on television, perhaps a reality TV star, and people start diagnosing them.

I mean, I get calls like that from trash outlets all the time that are like, oh, hey, do you think this person has a borderline personality disorder traits?

And yet it somehow still happens.

Why and how does that?

Are these rules in place because it's ethically morally wrong or because you can't actually know what's going on from your limited knowledge superficially?

Yeah, and this actually happened to be a point of prominence

five years ago on YouTube, maybe a little longer, where people started labeling one of the Paul brothers, was it Logan Paul or Jake Paul, a sociopath?

Oh, was it Shane Dawson?

So basically there was someone who was doing content with Shane Dawson in the mental health space saying that these individuals are sociopathic and essentially making the diagnosis without truly knowing them.

And to me, again, from just trying to be factually accurate, throwing the ethics and morals out of the equation for the time being, people on camera turn up their personalities, change the way they act, especially when there's viewership involved, money involved.

So to judge and understand them as a whole person feels like you're drastically not getting the whole picture.

Yeah.

What about from the standpoint, if you're talking about a fictional character, does the ethics then resolve and the accuracy is less important?

What does it mean to add psychological depth to a character?

is it always that like fatalistic for lack of a better word where if this happened this type of upbringing that means they'll develop in this certain way no it's actually the reverse i'm like okay this could come out this way like they're acting this way i could see that this could be in their background got it okay so it's not always just a one-to-one equation moving in both directions